The one word you use in military flying is duty. It's your duty. You have no control over outcome, no control over pick-and-choose. It's duty.

It's your duty to fly the airplane. If you get killed in it, you don't know anything about it anyway. Duty is paramount. It's that simple if you're a military guy. You don't say 'I'm not going to do that - that's dangerous.' If it's your duty to do it, that's the way it is.

That to me is a bunch of crap trying to shoot guys up into damned space. What they're going to do is they're going to wipe out half a dozen people one of these days, and that will be the end of it.

You concentrate on what you are doing, to do the best job you can, to stay out of a serious situation. That’s the way the X-1 was.

There is no kind of ultimate goal to do something twice as good as anyone else can. It's just to do the job as best you can. If it turns out good, fine. If it doesn't, that's the way it goes.

What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.

Everybody that I've ever seen that enjoyed their job was very good at it.